At the last meeting, I gave a brief presentation about query support in general-purpose programming languages. The talks does not, obviously, cover the broad range of research that has been done in the area - instead, I focused on some langauges that I'm familiar with and at features that make them interesting in some way, so I talked about LINQ (in C#), monad comprehensions in Haskell and customizable queries in F# 3.0.
The slides from the talk can be found on SlideShare:
Queries in general purpose languages
View more presentations from Tomas Petricek.
One of the topics that are discussed in the talk is how the
join
clause in LINQ corresponds to the operation of applicative functors. To find out more about this topic, you can also read Beyond the Monad fashion (I.): Writing idioms in LINQ and Beyond the Monad fashion (II.): Creating web forms with LINQ on my blog.